Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Animal Form

      January 22, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      On Fantasy and Artifice

      January 19, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Tales From the End of the Bus Line: Aging Ungraciously

      January 18, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Salt and Sleep

      January 15, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: A Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

      January 2, 2020

      Introspection

      Returning Home with Ross McElwee

      December 13, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Little Birds

      December 11, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Perdix and a Pear Tree

      December 9, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Glimmer of Blue

      November 23, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Circling for Home

      November 13, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: The Guest

      November 9, 2020

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness by Heather Sweeney

      January 21, 2021

      Review

      Review: Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres

      January 18, 2021

      Review

      Perceived Realities: A Review of M-Theory by Tiffany Cates

      January 14, 2021

      Review

      Review: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

      January 11, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

      Small Press

      death of workers whilst building skyscrapers

      November 10, 2020

      Small Press

      Slate Roof Press

      September 15, 2020

      Small Press

      Ellipsis Press

      September 1, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Animal Form

      January 22, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      On Fantasy and Artifice

      January 19, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Tales From the End of the Bus Line: Aging Ungraciously

      January 18, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Salt and Sleep

      January 15, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: A Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

      January 2, 2020

      Introspection

      Returning Home with Ross McElwee

      December 13, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Little Birds

      December 11, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Perdix and a Pear Tree

      December 9, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Glimmer of Blue

      November 23, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Circling for Home

      November 13, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: The Guest

      November 9, 2020

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness by Heather Sweeney

      January 21, 2021

      Review

      Review: Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres

      January 18, 2021

      Review

      Perceived Realities: A Review of M-Theory by Tiffany Cates

      January 14, 2021

      Review

      Review: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

      January 11, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

      Small Press

      death of workers whilst building skyscrapers

      November 10, 2020

      Small Press

      Slate Roof Press

      September 15, 2020

      Small Press

      Ellipsis Press

      September 1, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Creative Nonfiction / Essay

TO THE TEETH #5

written by Mairead Case March 2, 2020

Today, I think a lot about Audre Lorde and pain, which she said is a part of living. If you don’t know pain, you’re not alive, which is different than saying pain is its own reason for being. (It is also different than saying life is pain, even though it feels that way sometimes.) I think about this when I teach kids how to run and stretch, which is one way of helping them be in space and time (if they want that help, if they’re ready for it, if they even need it). Muscles can’t grow without hurting, and generally speaking, if you’re a kid you have some growing to do.

It’s tricky. I think a lot about how to help my students name, hold, and heal the kind of pain Lorde talks about. This is very different than causing it, naming it for them, or asking them to hold mine, and because right now my students are many different kinds of people in many different classrooms (a middle school, a jail, a university; online and off), ultimately this is an active, glittering hope for everyone’s futures. (On the days when I’m tired or stubborn and just want to protect everyone anyway, or when there’s an active shooter drill, we listen to Sun Ra. “I have a potent degree of love that is so unwise in one world,” he says, “that it is wisdom in another.”)

It’s especially tricky when you’re also encouraging kids to clock injustice and act against it (which is not an agenda; it’s a pedagogical practice), because to some of them, most immediately this looks like acting against you. (If you’re white, like I am. If you go by “Doctor,” like I do.)  And you know what? In broken systems like ours, often that’s a solid instinct, and so often, I get it. I want students to trust their guts. I also want them to know when a teacher is encouraging them to show up and to take their space. This goes back to Lorde, because knowing the difference between the two is vital. And it goes back to love, because I haven’t always known the difference myself.

While the actual action of it is not a good fit for me, today, I think a lot about Chip Delany’s All-Hands-Raised technique anyway. In many of his classrooms at CUNY, he asked every student to raise their hands for every question, whether they knew the answer or not. If they knew, great—and if they didn’t, they could say more about what they didn’t understand, or they could popcorn it to someone else in the room: also great. “I’m not sure, but I’m wondering what Person X thinks.” “Don’t you realize,” Chip says in Frederick Barney Taylor’s Polymath documentary, “that every time you don’t answer a question, you’re learning something? You’re learning to make do with what you’ve got … you’re learning to take it.” Obviously, this is a complicated dynamic, but the core of it is, I think, a golden truth. When we do similar exercises in my classrooms, I remind students about the iceberg principle (there’s always a lot happening under the surface, for everyone) and also that outside of the classroom, I consider myself an introvert. Sometimes speaking up is easy, and sometimes it’s hard. How does your body feel when you do it?

A while ago I realized that when tell kids I also teach at the jail, many of them think that means I’m a guard. More recently, a student handed me a poem about how I didn’t understand violence against people of color in this country, and okay: maybe you don’t know me very well, but also: you’re not wrong. There are things I can’t know. There are rooms that aren’t for me. We talked about it. I’m writing about this because it’s hard.

Another thing about pain is it can be really pretty. I’ve lived in places shimmering with pain—not identically to you, reader, but probably similarly—and I stayed, for practical reasons but also because pain, when you are in it like a dull roar (as opposed to a sliced artery, as opposed to generationally) can be lovely to watch or even feel, like John Ott’s time-lapse footage of flowers blooming in the 1950s. It can also be exhausting, in a way that feels like you must also be helping. You must be making it easier for yourself or someone else, somewhere. When you know you are not, you must unstick. Right now, when I need to unstick, I stand in my studio apartment and listen to Brian Eno’s “The True Wheel.” I know I’m growing because I used to lie down when I did it.

I think of Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector’s book that could be about being alive, being conscious, or living differently. It is frequently described as a spiderweb. The spider is never mentioned. As Lispector says, in Stefan Tobler’s translation, “I know that after you read me it’s hard to reproduce my song by ear, it’s not possible to sing it without having learned it by heart. And how can you learn something by heart if it has no story?” This too is painful. Pain haloes or sparks or numbs, and in this way it is a spectacle, not a story. It is now, it is now, it is now. (Last fall at the ice cream shop after school, I remember a kid clutching a photograph of a mountain and crying. “It isn’t the actual mountain!” he told me. “It’s a picture!” His mom sat with him and rubbed his back.)

I think a lot about how to name pain without exploding or colonizing it. I think about Paul Eluard’s “To Make Live,” which my friend Jack posted in translation on the internet. “A little bit of sleep,” it says, “Brought back their future sun. / They lasted and they knew that living does continue.” Then a break, then “They were only a few / Suddenly they were a multitude // This is of all times.” Nate Marshall’s poem “Landless Acknowledgement,” recently published at Split Lip Magazine, is here too. “what is a homeland for me? maybe a boat?” Maybe.

Audre Lorde says that the hurt we feel from working and struggling is important because it teaches us how to transcend pain, and by extension, how it is directed towards some bodies and not others. I care about this every day. “The only kind of pain that is intolerable,” Lorde says, “is pain that is wasteful, pain from which we do not learn.” To be clear, I don’t push pain on my students! And I don’t ask them to share my past struggles. They don’t know that my left eyebrow is also a scar from falling into a brick wall after an action. They don’t know, because it doesn’t matter anymore. It isn’t a proof. It’s my eyebrow.

But pain comes up in our stories. It comes up in our lives, often it is our world, and if we pretend otherwise, we are not equipping ourselves to shift. To heal. I think of KC Green’s comic about the little dog drinking coffee at the table in the room on fire. “This is fine,” the dog says. Most adults I know laugh at those two images, and most kids don’t. Kids can specifically imagine what happens next, and when they do it’s uncomfortable. Being able to imagine that end, and admitting that you are, is a strength, not only narratively but because it means you know you are not now the dog in the burning house. You know you could be a helper. You can raise your hand. When adults say they can’t imagine, I am awfully disappointed.

It is also important to say that it’s possible to sit with pain without describing it, or trying to fix it. While of course sometimes this numbs us to what’s actually intolerable, more often it builds our endurance or stops internal gaslighting. (The difference between “That sounds really hard. What’s our next step?” and “Get yourself together!” can be huge.) I think about this when I’m riding the train at Denver International Airport. “Please, hold on,” it says. “Please, hold on.” And I thought about it during my last two years of graduate school, which were so lonely. Eventually I felt like I couldn’t laugh or cry because I hadn’t looked at anyone in days, I hadn’t touched anyone, and so I started going near-obsessively to movies. I knew this wouldn’t fix my loneliness, but it helped me hold it. When you hold something, it isn’t you. I spent a lot of time taking pictures of the flowers in the movie theatre bathroom. They’re plastic, so they’re still there: turquoise, and purple, and blue. It can be funny to go back to something that hasn’t changed when you have.

Right now at night I’m reading Magda Szabó’s book Iza’s Ballad, translated by George Szirtes. In its beginning, World War II is over and one protagonist, Ettie, receives news that her husband Vince is about to die. The message is communicated wordlessly and clearly. Ettie has a piece of toast in her hand. Then, while the messenger Antal warms his hands on the stove, Ettie packs a bag of handkerchiefs, biscuits, and lemons. I love this scene because the lemons read bright and loud against the copper and fire described just earlier, and also because Ettie is refusing to let the pain swallow her. Lemons aren’t a metaphor for anything—they’re Vince’s favorites, and by bringing them to the clinic Ettie can remind herself that the meetings are not actually about her. They’re about him. When you hold something, it isn’t you. Later, the pain does swallow Ettie, and after that it doesn’t. Soon, it shifts entirely. “I am still learning,” Lorde says too, “to take joy in all the people I am.”

 

| mairead.case @ gmail

 

 

TO THE TEETH #5 was last modified: February 26th, 2020 by Mairead Case
TO THE TEETH
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Mairead Case

Mairead Case (she her hers) is a working writer and teacher in Denver.

previous post
Stars to Stories – March 2020 Horoscopes
next post
Entropy’s Guide to #AWP20

You may also like

Paradise

February 15, 2018

With or Without My Best Intentions: On the 25th Anniversary of the Murder of Mia Zapata

July 31, 2018

WOVEN: Say Nothing

April 27, 2018

The Poetics of Spaces: Inyo National Forest & Outward

August 19, 2014
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • Lei Yu wow so beautifully written!

    Review – : once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio ·  January 18, 2021

  • Lisa S Thank you so much for your kind words and your feedback. I can only hope my story is able to help someone who needs it.

    WOVEN: This isn’t love ·  January 8, 2021

  • Ann Guy Thank you, Josh. And glad you didn’t get tetanus at band camp on that misguided day.

    A Way Back Home ·  December 24, 2020

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • Food and Covid-19
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2020 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top